LAST November 25th in his Autumn Statement Chancellor Osborne was full of praise for the way that allegedly the UK was now full set on the road to recovery and boasting that the worst was over.
He said: ‘Since the Summer Budget new economic data has been published which confirm this: Since 2010, no economy in the G7 has grown faster than Britain. We’ve grown almost three times faster than Japan, twice as fast as France, faster than Germany and at the same rate as the United States.
‘And that growth has not been fuelled by an irresponsible banking boom, like in the last decade. Business investment has grown more than twice as fast as consumption; exports have grown faster than imports and the North has grown faster than the South.’
Yesterday he revealed that this was so much empty rubbish and that his Wednesday budget would contain yet more savage cuts made necessary by a deepening of the world crisis of the capitalist system, which the ex-Bank of England chief, King, suggested in his new book, fittingly called ‘The End of Alchemy’, is heading towards the greatest economic castastrophe in its crisis ridden history.
The truth is that the ruling classes and their economists are worshippers and slaves of the ‘markets’, that man-made product of the capitalist system of commodity production, at whose feet they worship and whose favours they seek through heaping greater and greater austerity measures onto the backs of the working class, the real creators of the values produced in the capitalist system.
The Tory remedy for the capitalist crisis is to wring even more value out of the working class by attempting to bring back the 19th century by creating a nation of paupers and zero hours contract workers. There are already 810,000 zero hours contracts current in the UK.
These contracts return workers to being slaves of capital – they work till they drop, without any trade union or legal protection, a throw-back to the working conditions of the 19th century, that the Tories are determined to make into the working conditions of the 21st century.
This will be the job for the new anti-trade union laws that are being prepared. There is already an army of homeless being formed in the UK, with mass evictions taking place, the sell-off of council housing, the ending of social rents and the growing discoveries of homeless people who have been crushed while sleeping overnight in industrial rubbish bins.
Council housing is being sold off and replaced by a ‘pay to stay’ policy. George Osborne’s tenant tax will single out working households on modest incomes and hike up their rents. The average rent hike could be as high as £2,900 outside London, and £8,800 in London.
Then there is the savage attack on the disabled and ESA, where £1.9bn is to be saved over four years by reducing the Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) from £103 a week to £73, to save the Treasury £1.4bn over four years.
This is being followed up by another attack on the disabled with the effort to claw back the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) for disabled people. The government said 640,000 people would be affected by this by 2020 and that it would claw back £1.2bn.
At the same time the assault is taking place on the Junior Doctors to make them work for seven days for five days pay. This is is a barely disguised drive to create the conditions for NHS privatisation and selling off chunks of the NHS to the US private medical industry.
This is how Osborne and Co plan to put British capitalism back onto its feet, by destroying the greatest gains of the working class movement. However, they are finding that the Junior Doctors are no push-over, and have the support of the entire working class.
This struggle is now reaching a decisive point. The next 48-hour strike action by the Junior Doctors is on April 6th. The whole trade union movement must strike with them and not return to work until the Cameron government is brought down and replaced by a workers’ government and socialism.
